ThinkRank AI SEO – AI SEO Plugin for WordPress: Schema, XML Sitemaps, Meta Tags, Search Console & Local SEO

Changelog

2.0.2

Release Date: 2026-08-25

• New: A master Enable Schema Markup switch in Schema Manager. While it is off, the Organization, Website and Person forms stay read-only with a notice explaining why, and no structured data is published
• Changed: Picking an image is now the same compact control everywhere — the post Social tab, Hero & Branding, and the setup wizard
• Fixed: Saving Schema Manager settings left a single schema type live even when four were enabled and configured
• Fixed: Turning Knowledge Graph or Auto-Generate Schema off had no effect — both stayed on
• Fixed: Opening a post’s schema screen rewrote what you had deployed and published types you never chose
• Fixed: Switching a post’s schema type left the old type published beside the new one
• Fixed: Structured data carried dates in a format Google reports as invalid, which drops the Article rich result
• Fixed: The site language was published as en_US where search engines expect en-US
• Fixed: Empty titles, descriptions and image dimensions were published as blank values instead of being left out, which fails validation harder than their absence
• Fixed: Your business and your personal profile were given a new identity on every address, so one business looked like many to a crawler
• Fixed: A page could carry two breadcrumb trails
• Fixed: FAQ questions and HowTo steps typed in the editor were emptied when saved, so FAQ schema could never be deployed
• Fixed: Schema deployed while a post was still a draft advertised the draft’s temporary address forever
• Fixed: Importing schema from a URL missed the layout Yoast and Rank Math publish, and an entry with more than one type was rejected
• Fixed: Review and Video schema were offered in the editor and then rejected on save
• Fixed: The Person “Profile URLs” box would not take a second URL — the new line was erased as it was typed
• Fixed: One schema type failing validation took every valid type down with it on each save
• Fixed: A role granted schema access was locked out of deploying and of every site-wide schema screen
• Fixed: Schema Cache Duration was saved and then never applied
• Fixed: WooCommerce shop archives got no schema at all
• Fixed: Repeated settings saves made each save slower than the last, up to hundreds of extra database queries
• Fixed: The editor’s schema preview showed raw stored data after a reload, and deleting one saved schema could overwrite another
• Fixed: An AI provider declining a request was retried, doubling the cost of a request that was never going to succeed
• Fixed: An AI assistant sending an unexpected field to ThinkRank got a server error instead of a clear message
• Fixed: The WordPress admin menu’s fly-out panels were cut off at the bottom of the screen when opened from a low menu item such as Settings or Tools

2.0.1

Release Date: 2026-08-23

• New: A Delivery Method setting for your llms.txt file — automatic, a static file in the site root, or served by WordPress. On Nginx the web server sends the file without naming its character set, which turns accented letters and curly quotes into mojibake; served by WordPress it always arrives as UTF-8. Automatic picks the right one for your server
• New: The keyword breakdown — title, meta description, content, image alt, address — now shows on posts with a single focus keyword. It was being calculated and then hidden unless you had two or more keywords, which is the least common setup. Each row now states plainly whether it Matched or not
• New: Page 2 and beyond of an archive or a multi-page post now describes itself: its own title, its own address, and previous/next links, instead of repeating page 1
• Fixed: Settings that saved and then did nothing. The breadcrumb “Show current page” switch, the %site_description% and %tagline% variables, the sitemap include toggles for anything other than the admin screen, and the Open Graph type and Twitter card type choices all persisted without changing what your site published
• Fixed: Saving settings for a category could answer with an error after the save had already succeeded, so you re-entered settings that were never lost
• Fixed: If a settings screen failed to load it silently filled the form with defaults. Pressing Save then wrote those defaults over everything you had stored — on the Robots.txt screen that emptied a saved robots.txt. The screen now shows an error with a Retry button and refuses to save until a load succeeds
• Fixed: Flipping two switches quickly made the first one silently revert and stay reverted after a reload
• Fixed: The Local SEO switch could not be turned on — the save was rejected for a business name whose field only appears after the switch is on
• Fixed: Saving Site Identity stored a copy of the whole response back into your settings, growing the payload on every save
• Fixed: A settings screen would store any stray field a client sent it, and once stored it came back in every later response and was written again on every save, so the settings table and every settings request grew and never shrank. Only settings ThinkRank actually defines are stored now, and strays already saved are cleared on upgrade
• Fixed: An SEO title or meta description saved on a category, tag or custom taxonomy term was ignored on the archive page — the theme’s own title was used and no description was published, while the admin screen showed the value as saved. Open Graph and Twitter values stored on a term now render too
• Fixed: Category, tag, author, date and search archives published no address or description to social networks, and an author archive’s title lost its separator
• Fixed: A Twitter-specific description saved on a post was never used; the card showed the Open Graph description instead
• Fixed: Pages built with shortcodes or page builders published their own shortcode source as the meta description
• Fixed: WooCommerce product pages carried two aggregate ratings, which Search Console reports as a critical error on every reviewed product. ThinkRank now stands aside from WooCommerce’s own product markup when it publishes its own
• Fixed: The sitemap listed the cart, checkout and account pages that ThinkRank’s own robots.txt blocks, so Search Console reported “Submitted URL blocked by robots.txt” on every store
• Fixed: robots.txt put a blank line between each Sitemap line, which ends the record for a crawler, and listed child sitemaps the index already covers. The screen also reported the served file as in sync when it was not
• Fixed: On WPML sites every translation in the sitemap pointed at the default language’s address
• Fixed: The readability score could report “Very Difficult (0)” on ordinary writing, because silent letters were counted as extra syllables
• Fixed: SEO suggestions are now ordered by how many points they can actually recover, and advice for a factor already scoring full marks is no longer listed
• Fixed: Core Web Vitals your site has no field data for were counted as failures, pushing the performance score down by 15–30 points for data you do not control. Unmeasured metrics are now reported as unmeasured
• Fixed: AI-drafted articles could carry heading labels (“H2: “) into the published heading text
• Fixed: Uninstalling the free plugin deleted an active ThinkRank Pro installation’s license and settings. Uninstall also left scheduled tasks and term data behind, and on a network install only cleaned the current site
• Fixed: Bulk SEO Optimization could show one post type’s settings under another and save them there if you switched post types quickly
• Fixed: An imported schema field could not be edited — the text snapped back as soon as it stopped being valid JSON — Print as PDF did nothing under a pop-up blocker, and the social preview could repaint with an out-of-date result
• Fixed: A failed save on Site Identity reported the literal word “undefined” instead of the reason
• Fixed: On sites whose database is not utf8mb4, none of ThinkRank’s tables could be created: every settings save failed with a generic error and Quick Setup could not be completed. Affected sites heal on upgrade, and the real database error is now reported instead of a generic message
• Fixed: A page that does not exist advertised your homepage as its address and carried social tags
• Fixed: Every page carried a second viewport tag beside the theme’s
• Fixed: FAQ blocks on a blog or archive listing published their own FAQ structured data beside the page’s, and a block theme could publish the same questions twice
• Fixed: The MCP connection token was stored in the database in plain text. It is admin-equivalent, so it is now stored hashed and encrypted; existing connections keep working
• Fixed: Several REST routes accepted any post or page id from a user with only a section permission, exposing titles and descriptions from other authors’ drafts, and four of them wrote settings onto content the caller could not edit
• Fixed: The protection against fetching internal addresses checked one address and then connected to whatever the hostname resolved to a moment later
• Performance: Anonymous page views make fewer database queries — a Google token refresh no longer runs on the front end, AI traffic counting is batched instead of locking a row on every visitor, and schema and settings lookups are cached properly

2.0.0

Release Date: 2026-08-20

• New: The FAQ block has a new accordion design and each answer can now carry its own image. The question sits on its own row with a plus that becomes a minus when the answer opens, a line separates the open question from its answer, and the image you add shows with the answer — and travels into the FAQ structured data, so search engines can use it
• Fixed: While editing an FAQ block the question and answer fields did not line up — the question was pushed to the right edge while the answer stayed on the left, which made an empty item look broken
• Fixed: Changing a page’s address from ThinkRank’s Permalink field looked like it did nothing. The new address was saved, but the editor went on showing the old one until the page was reloaded, so it read as though nothing had happened. In Elementor, Divi and Oxygen it genuinely did nothing: the address was never saved at all
• Fixed: The check for whether your keyword appears in the page address was wrong in both directions. On a draft it always reported the keyword as missing, whatever the address said, and only began passing once the post was published. On a published page it could report a match that actually came from a parent page, a category or a date in the address rather than from the page’s own address. Each line of the keyword breakdown now states plainly whether it matched or not, instead of leaving you to read it out of a list of words

1.32.0

Release Date: 2026-08-18

• New: All of ThinkRank’s structured data is now published as one linked graph instead of several separate scripts. A page that had, say, an Article, a breadcrumb trail and an FAQ used to emit three unconnected blocks — search engines now receive one graph in which those entities reference each other, and duplicate or competing entries are merged away
• New: FAQ content is collected from anywhere on the page — the FAQ block, the Elementor FAQ widget and any FAQ you deployed for the post — and published as a single FAQPage instead of several competing ones with different questions
• New: The Instant Indexing Submit URLs screen tells you what will actually be sent before you send it. Line numbers down the side, and each URL checked as you type: URLs pointing at another site, lines that are not URLs and duplicates are all called out, with a counter against the 100-URL limit. Clean up tidies the list, Clear empties it, Cmd/Ctrl+Enter submits, and the success message says how many URLs went
• New: The submission history screen was rebuilt — an empty state instead of a blank table, readable response codes with an explanation of what each one means, and Refresh now really re-reads the log, so URLs you just submitted show up immediately
• New: Every feature on/off switch now saves itself. Flipping a switch is the save — there is no separate Save button to remember, the switch rolls back and tells you if the save fails, and a short message confirms the new state. The Save button stays where you are filling in a form
• New: Screens show a placeholder shaped like the content while their data loads, instead of the word “Loading” or a blank panel
• New: Role Manager can grant or withhold AI Insights and Manage Roles separately, like every other ThinkRank area
• Changed: Connecting ChatGPT and other AI assistants now works on hosts that answer /.well-known/ addresses themselves before WordPress ever sees the request — reported on SiteGround, where the connection failed with “does not implement OAuth”. ThinkRank now advertises an address that reaches WordPress on every host, and publishes the discovery files directly where a host insists on serving them itself
• Fixed: The first few sentences of a password-protected post were published as its meta description, and in its Facebook and X preview text — visible to anyone requesting the page and to every crawler and link preview, while the page itself still showed the password form. Questions from an FAQ block on a protected post could be published the same way
• Fixed: AI content briefs were displayed without sanitizing them. Brief text comes back from an AI provider and can include content pulled from competitor pages you supplied, so it is not trusted input; it is now cleaned before it is stored and before it is shown
• Fixed: A user given access to only the Social Media or Schema section could read the SEO details of posts they cannot edit — including other authors’ drafts and pending posts — by changing the post number in the request
• Fixed: A user given access to only the Settings section could write post-specific social and SEO settings onto another author’s post, changing what its public page shares. The same request also overwrote your site-wide defaults
• Fixed: Saving settings reported a server error even though the settings had been saved, on 8 of the 11 settings groups. People re-entered settings that were never lost, and a genuine failure looked identical to the permanent one. A successful save also came back empty, leaving the form blank
• Fixed: A published llms.txt file could display accented and non-Latin characters as mojibake (“Aktivitäten” as “Aktivitäten”) because the file was served without saying which character set it used. The bytes were always correct — only the declaration was missing
• Fixed: On block themes, a page with an FAQ block published its questions twice — once inside ThinkRank’s graph and once in a second block beside it
• Fixed: A Codex connection on the MCP screen showed a plain letter instead of the OpenAI mark
• Fixed: The two Schema screens showed their title three times over before any content, and the Global SEO, Crawling and Author Archives screens had the wrong icon or a missing divider

1.31.0

Release Date: 2026-08-16

• New: Submission Coverage for Instant Indexing — compares every published URL against the last successful IndexNow submission and tells you what is stale, what failed and what was never announced, then closes the gaps on its own once a day. There is a Reconcile Now button for when you do not want to wait
• New: A noindex you set on a category, tag or custom taxonomy archive is finally applied. The setting saved and read back correctly before, but the archive still carried your site-wide default — and the archive is now dropped from the XML sitemap too, so the sitemap cannot advertise a page that asks not to be indexed
• New: The Robots.txt screen shows what crawlers actually receive right now, and warns you when a robots.txt file sitting in your site’s folder is being served by the web server instead of the content you saved
• Changed: ThinkRank now runs on PHP 7.4 and higher, instead of requiring PHP 8.0
• Changed: WordPress’s own sitemap is switched off while ThinkRank’s is enabled, so your site stops publishing two competing sitemaps and pointing search engines at both
• Changed: Core Web Vitals now reports Interaction to Next Paint, the metric Google replaced First Input Delay with
• Fixed: /sitemap.xml led search engines to a dead page on sites using a sitemap index — the one sitemap URL crawlers guess. It now goes to the sitemap you actually publish, and while your sitemap has not been generated yet WordPress’s own sitemap is left in place rather than leaving that URL answering nothing
• Fixed: Cleaning up sitemaps deleted any file in your site’s folder with “sitemap” in its name — including WordPress’s own and other plugins’ — and then left your site with no sitemap and nothing scheduled to rebuild it. It now removes only ThinkRank’s files and queues the rebuild
• Fixed: Turning off a content type stopped its sitemap from being updated but left the old file serving and listed in the index. Sitemaps you no longer publish are now removed
• Fixed: Regenerating the sitemap from anywhere other than the settings screen could republish one flat sitemap over your sitemap index, or republish files that had lost their styling and their image entries
• Fixed: When a Core Web Vitals check fails, ThinkRank now tells you why — your site could not be reached, no Google connection, or the daily quota is used up — instead of reporting a server error for all three. Pressing refresh after a failure also really re-measures now, and a site set up with only a PageSpeed API key works without a Google account
• Fixed: The historical performance charts drew an empty card for a metric with no measurements, most visibly for the new INP metric on sites with older data
• Fixed: Open Graph told Facebook and LinkedIn your site was in US English no matter what language it was actually in
• Fixed: Pages built with Elementor and similar builders contributed no links, images or headings to SEO analysis, so scores and recommendations were based on text alone
• Fixed: SEO Insights failed with a server error on sites that had connected PageSpeed
• Fixed: With some caching or optimization plugins, ThinkRank’s screens and the Dashboard widget could stay stuck on “Loading” forever
• Fixed: The AI usage overview reported empty fields on a site that had not used any AI features yet

See changelog for all versions.